Friday, March 14, 2003
20 North Koreans defect to South Korea
Agence France-Presse Seoul, March 14
A group of 20 North Koreans, who fled their famine-hit homeland, arrived in South Korea on Friday, Seoul's National Intelligence Service said.
The North Koreans arrived at the Incheon Airport, west of Seoul, and were under investigation, the South Korean spy agency said.
It refused to give details on the northerners who Yonhap news agency said had sneaked into China and taken shelter at the South Korean embassy in Beijing before flying to Manila and on to Incheon.
The number of North Koreans fleeing their impoverished homeland to South Korea nearly doubled to 1,141 last year, according to the South's unification ministry.
The figure has risen about two-fold annually for the last few years with 72 arriving in 1998, 148 in 1999, 312 in 2000 and 583 in 2001, the ministry said.
A growing number of North Koreans is fleeing their Stalinist homeland because of chronic food and energy shortages caused by a failed centralized economic policy and a series of natural disasters.
The Korean peninsula has been divided into the communist North and the capitalist South since 1945.
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